Professor Kao is the best professor that I have encountered. He has an unrivaled ability to interact with his students, fielding questions and reiterating content while making everybody feel included and listened to. Particularly, he is very good at noticing when he has lost the class and is willing to take his time to backtrack and ensure that the majority of students understand the material, and it is game changing. This class covers some of the most interesting and challenging material in the computer science world and professor Kao makes it all digestible while simultaneously moving at breakneck speed.

I cannot stress enough how uniquely good these lectures are. I have taken four machine learning classes and this one class taught me more than the other three classes combined.

The homework assignments are extremely challenging and very time consuming, especially if you are terrible at linear algebra like I am. However, they are very rewarding and forced me to actually learn the algorithms inside and out. The exam did a great job of testing your mastery of the material, and you are provided with a lot of practice exams and review material. I did not do well, and it was my own fault, and I still got an A in the class.

If you actually want to learn about machine learning, this is by far the best way to do it. I cannot recommend professor Kao or this class strongly enough.

This class can be renamed from Neural Networks to Neurological Damage due to the heavy workload. Homeworks take A LOT of time, and they don’t release solutions to the coding parts. Assignments build on each other so if you don’t finish one, you still have to work on it before starting the next one. Otherwise it’s time to watch your grade-ient descent down the drain! Kao is very smart and a great lecturer, and the TA's are awesome with their help during discussions/office hours and videos uploaded to Bruinlearn. The midterm was fair, but somewhat of a time crunch, and the project at the end is challenging, but they offer help and grade nicely.

Do not be fooled by the high A rate. This class is an unbelievable amount of work, definitely no walk in the park. Since I was taking it w/o pre-reqs, it was even harder for me. The one midterm exam was okay, I'd estimate about ~60% of the class our year got A's. 5 homeworks, with Homeworks 2, 4, and 5 being the hardest. 1 end of quarter project; I found it really annoying that the project was due at the start of finals week. This is manageable if you have a good group, but if not or if working alone, this will likely destroy any studying time you can get for your other classes. If you like ML or looking to fill your schedule, then you should take this class. Otherwise, would not recommend taking this class if you have a heavy courseload. The professor and TA team are pretty goated tho.

A fantastic class with an outstanding professor. Kao is literally the goat of EE department at the moment. The class is genuinely one of the toughest one I will take at UCLA but Kao tries the best to make it easy to understand using intuition. Using intuition is the most important part of his class and you must learn his way to better grasp the concepts.

Attending his lectures are so worth it. I never missed a single lecture because I knew its impossible to learn the same way online in his recordings. Make good notes and cheat sheet for the exam. You should attend Rakshith's discussions and office hours if you are ever struggling. Trust me in the coming years he's gonna have a big name in EE TAs. Hes the most kind and respectful and works beyond his hours to teach you more about the content.

The exams are tough. Make sure you practice from the previous years papers to be better prepared. If you mess in the midterms, Kao allows replacing it with final upon a better performance. Take this class and you will actually fall in love with the title "Systems and signals". Good Luck :D

This class is difficult, but you learn a lot from the class. This is one of the "make or break" classes for the major, with a touch of shared suffering, but ultimately is very rewarding. The professors and TAs are very helpful, and is the key reason why a lot of us was successful in the class. The professors and TAs care for our success, are readily available in their office hours and discussions, but you still need to put effort in to get a good grade in the class. Kao posts clear lecture notes for the class, and all past exams (with solutions) from previous years onto the class page. The TAs host 3+ hour long review sessions before the midterm and final and goes in depth on what would be on the exams. The homework assignments would consist of 4 to 5 problems (in the first half of the course, the fifth problem is a Python problem). This class provided me an excellent foundation, and showed me a different toolkit to solve problems as you understand from a high level about signals and learn about the frequency domain.

This is a interesting seminar that introduces you to the research of biomedical devices that interface directly with neurons (brain machine interfaces or BMIs), and you get to hear Kao discuss about his research as well. The workload is very light, lecture notes are posted on BruinLearn, and only has a final project (fairly easy to complete) assigned during the last two weeks of the quarter that for my year is completed in MATLAB (Kao has plans to update this to Python like he did for assignments for his ECE 102 class).

Kao is an amazing professor with a kind and open heart. Him and his TAs will lead you through the tough patches. But don't be fooled, this class is difficult. If you fall behind make sure you catch up ASAP because each lecture builds on the next and if you don't pace yourself you will end up breaking yourself.

Out of all the classes I've taken, Professor Kao is 100% the best lecturer in the department. While the class is pretty difficult, he is able to break down the intuition required to understand the material. He also gives plenty of extra material to practice, releasing exams from previous years, original and annotated lecture notes, etc. This class does require a lot of time to do well in as you are assigned 7 HW assignments, each of which take multiple hours to complete. Professor Kao is really approachable and really cares about teaching. The exams are difficult, but because he teaches the material well, have pretty high medians/averages. The TAs for the class were also amazing.

I was not going to take this class, but I sat in on his first lecture and was captivated by him. He is genuinely a great lecturer, and it shows in his ratings. He and the TAs work really hard to make this class easy to understand and give you a solid foundation that other professors might not provide. There is no one better to take this class with.

If you can, would absolutely recommend taking the class with Kao - he is hands down the best lecturer I've had at UCLA until now! His lectures are clear and interesting, and have a good balance between presenting new content and doing examples, leading to you actually understanding complex stuff like convolution. If you're still confused, he has office hours multiple times a week and is responsive on email.

As other reviews said, the class material itself isn't easy. Homeworks take hours, which he warns you about. The difficulty helps you learn and prepares you for the exams, and all other aspects of the class support you. The exams themselves are fine and had high averages - spend some time reviewing the review sessions the TAs host, which almost mirror the actual exams.

Overall, would VERY highly recommend! Thanks Professor Kao and Rakshith!